The legal industry, like many others, has been working to improve its efforts toward diversity and inclusion. According to the American Bar Association (ABA), 85% of lawyers in the United States were white and 64% were men as recently as 2018. A myriad of initiatives aimed at remedying the lack of diversity exist, but one place corporate legal departments (CLDs) can start is by requiring an improvement in the diversity of their outside counsel.
While increasing diversity can seem like a daunting task, having quantifiable goals is a key and helpful step for kickstarting progress. Because, while hard numbers do not inherently create the cultural change required of true diversity and inclusion, data can still help propel law firms along.
